Welcome to ICT4Peace

Hello there!

I finally did it – after much procrastination, I set up a blog for dedicated to ICT for Peacebuilding and related areas of research.

There are several reasons why I set up a blog for ICT and Peacebuilding.

Obviously, I think this is a very important field of study – embryonic, but showing great promise to positively influence the fields of conflict transformation and peacebuilding in the future. My work and research over the past couple of years has engaged with the complexity of ICT support structures for peacebuilding – a fascinating and deeply frustrating field of work and study.

This blog aims to flesh out some of this research and experience alongside comparable and similar experiences of others thinking about or actually using ICT for peacebuilding.

Lastly, I needed to get my online life in order. Being invited to an increasing number of conferences and workshops to give expert opinion on ICT, Peace, Media, ODR and humanitarian systems design, I needed to have a single place to point people towards for more information on the issues I brought up. The first step was to delete my old and disused blogs and set up one website that collected in a single place my ideas, research and on-going work.

The second step was a blog to specifically chart the evolution of ideas in ICT for Peacebuilding – those of my own and of friends and colleagues worldwide engaged in this field – related to ICT and conflict transformation.

My hope is that this blog becomes a central node in the study of the design and application of ICTs for peace, highlighting the fantastic work already done by InfoShare and others, but also envisioning the future of where we should be going.

ICT4Peace is soon becoming a widely recognised acronym, denoting a growing interest in this field. It is an interest, I submit, that will hopefully result in the funding and research interest ICT4Peace so desperately needs to move from concept and design to application.

This blog is a small contribution towards this effort.